Recycled Alpaca Legwarmers

The Northeast, for those of you not residing here, has been nostril-freezingly cold these last few days. It was time, fair readers, to Break Out the Legwarmers. In Breaking Out the Legwarmers, I realized there was a project I had never shown you that took me about 15 minutes to complete one frigid winter night a couple of years back.

There was this old, furry alpaca sweater I'd picked up at a thrift store years back that had been warming a bag at the bottom of my closet. It was awfully schlumpy. So Mr. Schlumpy sweater became these:

I simply cut off the sleeves, hemmed the raw edge with my sewing machine, which stopped any unraveling, and ran some elastic through that hem. Ta da! Flashdance-worthy, vaguely vintagey alpaca legwarmers.

Yesterday in yoga class, though, the teacher was wearing these sort of stirrup-legwarmers that seemed easily worn with boots. As a bonus, they were black with silver blingy stuff in the yarn. I'm tempted to recreate them.

This space has been a little quiet lately. The kitchen has been dull for blogging purposes - I did a mild 7-day cleanse last week. If you are curious about how that went, I posted to the Namaste Knitters discussion board on Ravelry (be warned, however, TMI ahead). The short version is that the food was boring, but I felt like a million bucks. Surely part of the takeaway is supposed to be that one should stop fetishizing food, and think about what you eat actually does for you (or to you, in some cases), which lines up well with my goal for the new year. At the same time, eating, sometimes eating things that aren't that healthy, gives me pleasure. That pleasure has a value, too. So sorry, detox, I am just never going to give up a warm croissant on a Sunday morning!